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Sam Bankman-Fried says his bailouts of sputtering crypto firms were snap judgments and the results have been mixed

Sam Bankman-Fried FTX CEO crypto
FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.FTX
  • Sam Bankman-Fried told Bloomberg he's had "mixed" results in bailing out struggling crypto companies.

  • The FTX boss has been behind about $1 billion worth of deals during the ongoing crypto winter.

  • The "higher goal was trying to backstop places rather than maximizing on these deals," he said.

Billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried has stepped up this year to throw financial lifelines to struggling cryptocurrency firms and the results have been "mixed," he told Bloomberg.

The ongoing "crypto winter" has slashed the cryptocurrency market's value, with bitcoin sinking below $20,000 from $68,000, other digital assets crashing, and some crypto-linked companies cracking under the pressure.

The CEO of digital asset exchange FTX told Bloomberg in an interview published Wednesday he felt spearheading bailout deals was the right thing to do for the industry. The 30-year-old entrepreneur has been behind about $1 billion worth of deals

"Our very explicit mandate that we sort of gave to the team of people working on this was, 'Your goal is not to make a fortune … your goal is to do okay deals, your goal is for us to not get our faces ripped off,'" he said.

The "higher goal was trying to backstop places rather than maximizing on these deals," he said on Bloomberg's "David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations."

"Mixed is basically the answer," to the question of if the investments have been profitable. "Some of them are going to turn out to be profitable, some of them won't be."

He spoke briefly about Voyager Digital, a crypto lender who was offered a $485 million loan by Bankman-Fried's crypto trading firm Alameda Research. Voyager eventually filed for bankruptcy protection in July. For its part, Voyager has said Alameda Research had owed it $377 million.

"With Voyager, there's $70 million there that we put in that I'm not sure we're ever seeing again," Bankman-Fried said. "We had to make snap judgment calls," about deals and had to limit the amount that could be lost from investments.

FTX's American affiliate FTX US agreed to provide a $400 million revolving credit facility to BlockFi, and it has an option to buy the crypto trading and financial services company.

BlockFi had "just sort of burned through their runway, had a functional business with a strong team and just needed more cash to be able to operate effectively going forward," Bankman-Fried said.

He has been compared with investment banker John Pierpont Morgan who bailed out several major New York banks during the 1907 financial crisis. Bankman-Fried told Bloomberg the comparison doesn't bother him too much. "I would have loved other people to do [bailout deals]. Like, that would've been great."

Read the original article on Business Insider

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